Charles Rennie Mackintosh Chair
Okay folks, we’ve made a bowl, a lantern and a coffee table, (not to mention a t-shirt texture to upload ( I said not to mention it!) and while making them we’ve learnt to rez, resize, position, and texture objects. If you don’t know how to do these you need to go back to the previous tutorials in LOL or on my website http://titihaystack.wordpress.com
Today we’re going to make a chair. Not just any chair, but a stylish Rennie Mackintosh one. I Googled chair images to get an idea of dimensions and patterns. This chair has more prims than anything we’ve done so far, but you will get practice in positioning prims, and you can carry this learning over to other stuff.
So here goes. First, rez the ubiquitous cube (or box as it is called in SL) This is going to be the wooden chair base. Leave the x and y dimensions at .500 and make the z dimension .100 Originally I textured it with mahogany, and just changed some selected faces to a pattern, but in the end I made all the faces the same by selecting Floor Tile 3 out of the Library. I coloured it a reddish brown so the pattern was only just visible. Your chair doesn’t have to end up looking like mine. You can improvise. I played around with the Flip commands later, and got an attractive pattern on the wood (not illustrated here)
We want to put a cushion in/on the chair, so the next thing is to hollow the chair to 80.
Next you need to duplicate the shape, so select it, and drag it up a bit while holding down the shift key. Take away the hollowness by changing Hollow back to zero, and change the colour to white. Now you can see the pattern. This is the cushion so it needs to be a bit smaller. Change the x and y dimensions to .40 and .40, then gently lower the cushion into its base.(It says use .45 by .45 in the illustration, but the maths tells me it has to be .40 by .40 for the exact fit!)
Now we need to make the legs. Go to the brown base, duplicate it again, and drag it up out of the way so you can see what you’re doing.
Path cut .250
You now need to rotate it so it looks like two legs. The first time I did this I had to rotate it on the x axis, but the next time it needed to be on the y axis. Just see which is correct for you. Rotate it by 90 degrees anyway, and it will be upright.
You will find that the legs are positioned in the centre of your base, so you need to move them to the edge. You can do this mathematically, by moving it half the distance of the measurement of the base[i] (if this makes sense) but I just judge it by eye. When you’re happy with the position, duplicate it again and drag the new pair of legs to the other side of the base.
You now have a stool and you could stop here if you’re feeling lazy.
But we are just doing more of the same for the chair back. Select one of the pairs of legs and duplicate by dragging up. Do this three times, and you will have a ladder back chair. Well done.
Now to link it. Select all by dragging around it all, you will see everything highlighted, (make sure it is) then click Ctrl L to link it. (Cmd L on a Mac) Or you could go to the toolbar and select .Tool 4 Link from the drop down menu. I think it’s worth learning keyboard shortcuts as it’s quicker in the long run.
I explained before about naming objects and taking them into your inventory. I said to click ‘Take’. However, since then I use Edit -> More ->Take copy, as then a copy goes into your inventory. It seems safer somehow. If you Take before you’ve named it, you’ll find it’s called ‘Object’, maybe among a lot of other Objects, (shame on you), but it will be the one that is boxed in grey. If you organise your inventory by Date it will be the top object too. I usually organise by Name, but Date can be handy if you’ve lost something nameless!
So there we have it. Another item for our Second Life. Looking at my chair, I think the legs are too fat to be elegant. I’ll leave that to you to sort out. Also, you could add thin vertical slats instead of the horizontal ones. Hey,it’s your chair. Give it six legs! Have fun, and let me know what else you would like to build. See you inworld.
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